Oppen was born in New Rochelle, New York, the son of George
August Oppenheimer, a diamond merchant, and Elsie Rothfeld. The Oppenheimers were wealthy,
assimilated Jews who in 1927 shortened the family name to Oppen. When Oppen was four, his
mother committed suicide. His father remarried in 1917, and the family moved to San
Francisco the following year.

After a car accident in which one of his passengers was killed, Oppen was expelled from
military academy for drinking in 1925. The next year he entered Oregon State University at
Corvallis, where he met Mary Colby. Following his suspension and Colby's expulsion from
school for violating the curfew, they hitchhiked to New York, marrying in Dallas, in 1927.
The couple rejected the comfortable world of Oppen's parents and chose a life of
independence.

In 1928 he met Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff. Zukofsky's "Objectivist"
issue of Poetry (Feb. 1931) established the three of them along with William Carlos
Williams and Carl Rakosi as Objectivists, but like Zukofsky, Oppen denied they formed a
movement, insisting that objectivism referred to the necessity of form in a poem. However,
all of them shared the conviction that the poet must be faithful to the world of facts.

With the small income he received on turning twenty-one, the Oppens went to France
(1929) and established To Publishers (1931), which issued Zukofsky's An
Objectivists Anthology,Williams's A Novelette and Other Prose, and,
in one volume, Ezra Pound's How to Read and The Spirit of Romance (1932).
Financial difficulties led to the press's collapse before it could fulfill one of its
primary goals, the publication of Pound's collected prose.

Before returning to the United States in 1932, Oppen went to Rapallo where he met
Pound, who included Oppen in his Active Anthology (1933). Back in Brooklyn, Oppen
joined Zukofsky, Reznikoff, and Williams in setting up the Objectivist Press, which
published Williams's Collected Poems 1921-31 (preface by Wallace Stevens, 1934),
three books by Reznikoff, and Oppen's Discrete Series (preface by Pound, 1934).
According to Oppen, the title of his volume refers to a mathematical series of terms,
"each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true."
Each poem gives a separate image from the perspective of the poet. This adherence to the
concrete world was, for Oppen, a measure of sincerity and a consistent feature of his
poetry. The book received few reviews, but Pound praised him as "a serious
craftsman," and in a 1934 review for Poetry, Williams wrote, "by a sharp
restriction to essentials, the seriousness of a new order is brought to realization."

The Objectivist Press issued its last book in 1936, but in response to the rise of
fascism and the depression, Oppen had given up poetry and joined the Communist party a
year earlier. He and his wife worked with the unemployed in New York City, agitating for
basic social services, and Oppen helped organize industrial workers and direct-action
strikes in Utica, New York. Although he adhered to Marxist historical materialism, Oppen
later characterized his politics in the 1930s as liberal and antifascist.

With the end of the depression, he became less involved with politics. In 1940 the
Oppens had a daughter, and two years later he was inducted into the army after
deliberately forfeiting his work exemption as a machinist. He saw action in Europe from
October 1944 to 22 April 1945, when artillery hit his foxhole, seriously wounding him and
killing two others. He refers to this event in the third of "Some San Francisco
Poems," "Of Hours," "The Myth of the Blaze," and
"Semite." He was awarded the Purple Heart.

After the war, he moved to Redondo Beach, California, where he worked as a contractor
and a custom carpenter. Although the Oppens were no longer politically active, they
remained party members, and the FBI interviewed them in May and June 1949. Fearing
possible imprisonment, the Oppens a year later moved to Mexico City, where they remained
until 1958, making a few short visits to the United States before returning permanently in
1960.

During his years of political activity and exile, Oppen wrote no poetry. He said he
"didn't believe in political poetry or poetry as being politically efficacious."
In May 1958 he wrote his first new poem since 1934, "Blood from a Stone." His
second book, The Materials, appeared in 1962 to largely excellent reviews and was
followed by the equally successful This in Which (1965). These works express his
belief that "true seeing is an act of love." His reemergence made him an
important link for younger poets to the tradition of Pound and Williams. Oppen entered
literary life by giving frequent public readings and enjoying a wide circle of literary
friends.

On 31 May 1966 the FBI did its final report on the Oppens, which concerned their travel
plans; the couple went to France and Belgium that summer, and in 1967 they moved to San
Francisco. Public recognition came with the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Of Being Numerous (1968).
The title poem, a sequence of forty sections, explores the idea of humanity in a world of
multiplicity. The poems express Oppen's belief in the absolutely singular.

More honors followed, including a symposium on the Objectivists at the University of
Wisconsin in 1968. Oppen was named one of "Four Major American Poets" at the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1973 and was poet in residence at Mishkenot Sh'ananim,
Jerusalem, in 1975. On his return from Israel, Oppen's health began to decline. His The
Collected Poems of George Oppen (1975) was nominated for the 1976 National Book Award,
and in 1977 he completed his last collection, Primitive (1978). Later honors
included lifetime recognition awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and
Letters and from the National Endowment for the Arts. In December 1982 he received the
PEN/West Rediscovery Award. That same year he was diagnosed as having Alzheimer's disease.
He died two years later in Sunnyvale, California. His work remains highly regarded for its
clarity, craftsmanship, and philosophical respect for the singularity of things in a world
of multiplicity. Many younger poets committed to the modernist tradition acknowledge his
influence.

Oppen's papers are located at the Archive for New Poetry, University of California, San
Diego. Books not mentioned above include Alpine: Poems (1969) and Seascape:
Needle's Eye (1972). An indispensable document for the history of the Objectivists and
Oppen's poetic theory is The Selected Letters of George Oppen (1990), which
contains a valuable introduction and chronology by its editor, Rachel Blau DuPlessis.
Oppen wrote only one essay, "The Mind's Own Place," Kulchur 3 (1963).
Selections from his notebooks have appeared in Ironwood 26 (1985): 5-31; Conjunctions
10 (1987): 186-208; Iowa Review 18, no. 3 (1988): 1-17; and in three issues of Sulfur--25
(1989): 10-43; 26 (1990): 135-64; and 27 (1990): 202-20.

No biography has been written, but Mary Oppen's Meaning a Life: An Autobiography (1978)
is important for understanding their relationship and their political activities. An
account of To Publishers and the Objectivist Press can be found in Pound/Zukofsky:
Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (1987). Charles
Tomlinson, in Some Americans: A Personal Record (1981), offers a view of the
enmities that developed between Oppen and Zukofsky. An invaluable interview conducted by
L. S. Dembo first appeared in Contemporary Literature 10(1969) and is
reprinted in The Contemporary Writer (1972).

Bibliographies of secondary criticism can be found in a special issue of Paideuma
10, no. 1 (1981) devoted entirely to Oppen and in George Oppen: Manand Poet (1981),
which contains interviews with the Oppens as well as essays and memoirs. Oppen is featured
in Ironwood 5 (1975) and 26 (1985). Critical discussions of his work are available
in Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (1975); Michael
Heller, Convictions Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry (1985);
John Freeman, ed., Not Comforts/But Visions: Essays on the Poetry of George Oppen
(1985); L. S. Dembo, The Monological Jew: A Literary Study (1988); and Joseph M.
Conte, Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry (1991). An obituary is in
the New York Times, 9 July 1984.

As an heir of modernist poetics, George Oppen, like all poetic inheritors, appears
simultaneously as disciple and iconoclast. For Oppen, Pound is a fairly remote mentor and
Williams is an older pioneer. The ground they broke becomes the foundation of a literary
venture that both reinterprets and challenges modernist poetics on formal and ideological
grounds. Oppen and his fellow objectivists may be seen as the followers or a
well-established modernist tradition, a view best expressed by Hugh Kenner: "They are
the best testimony to the strength of that tradition: to the fact that it had substance
separable from the revolutionary high spirits or its launching. None of them makes as if
to ignite bourgeois trousers. All that was history .They simply got on with their
work."

But while Oppen did "get on with his work," we must also consider what he
brought to it: a profound knowledge of left-wing politics heightened by years of activism.
When we consider his own remarks, we find that, grounded in the tradition as they may be,
they also denote a position of ethical concern that is usually foreign to earlier
modernist utterance: "I'm trying to describe how the test of images can be a test of
whether one's thought is valid, whether one can establish in a series of images, of
experiences . . . whether or not one will consider the concept of humanity to be valid,
something that is, or else have to regard it as being simply a word." In such
statements as this, and in the whole of Oppen's poetic opus, the direct confrontation with
exterior reality crucial to Pound's version of imagism and Williams' version of
objectivism undergoes subjectification in explicitly moral terms. This is not to say that
Pound and Williams are not concerned with the moral impetus behind the development of
exteriorizing poetics. But for Oppen, refining imagist techniques and developing an
objectivist poetic begins with what he calls "a part of the function of poetry to
serve as a test of truth."

This at first seems an odd stance for a modernist heir to assume, and indeed, the
ideological quandary it presents to Oppen at the outset of his career compels a drastic
solution. For the subjectivity of Oppen's concern with truth, or at least personal
sincerity"a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and
you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction "goes hand in hand
with extreme forms of nominalism and empiricism that demand concrete evidence for abstract
assertions, especially in the field of the poem. This attitude is at its height in the
early poems, when Oppen's empiricism places reality in the poem as a "discrete
series," fragmented and unrelated to itself except through the poet's consciousness.
As L. S. Dembo points out, "While the poet aimed to be empirical, the best he could
be in actuality was true to his own perceptionsnot necessarily true to the thing as
it was but true to it as encountered."This is the paradox of
objectivism, a dialectical impasse in which the goal of objectivity directs the poet back
on himself and his faith in his own perceptions. Williams discovered this when he sought
an objective poetry that could deal with complex political issues, and Pound certainly
discovered it when he departed from imagism into an increasingly more confused quest for
historical truth.

But for Oppen, the young rebel determined to break with his bourgeois background, the
harsh political realities of the thirties make the question of objectivity a moot point:
the poet's immediate perceptions were of "fifteen million families that were faced
with the threat of immediate starvation." Previously, Oppen and his wife Mary had
studied Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, and, on their visit to Pound
in Rapallo, were chagrined by their mentor's support of Fascism and economic naivete.
Despite their youthful involvement with the arts, the next step in their careers was
becoming clear. As Mary writes in her autobiography, "An appeal was made to
intellectuals by the seventh World Congress of the Communist Parties in 1935 to join in a
united front to defeat fascism and war. We responded to that call, and in the winter of
1935 we decided to work with the Communist Party, not as artist or writer because we did
not find honesty or sincerity in the so-called arts of the left. . . . We said to each
other, 'Let's work with the unemployed and leave our other interest in the arts for a
later time."'

The Oppens' decision to abandon what was essentially a Bohemian existence and instead
attempt to organize the unemployed as members of the Communist Party indicates one
direction that the poetic consciousness may take when confronted with the ethical
imperative of social action as a response to the immediate conditions of reality. There
comes a point when poetry is no longer serviceable; it becomes a luxury, and therefore
antithetical to its origins in the poet's thought and emotions: "There are situations
which cannot honorably be met by art." Oppen knows that ultimately, man formulates
his political vision through an artistic response. As he says, "the definition of the
good life is necessarily an aesthetic definition." This "definition" is
implicit throughout the poetry as a rigorously controlled but still vital Utopian impulse,
quietly visionary despite the poet's professed distrust of such "subjective"
matter. But in the midst of actual political struggle, the aesthetic decision upon which
the creation of art is contingent must be set aside. When the circumstances change, and
the poet returns to his calling, the reverse becomes true: he must "declare his
political non-availability," an attitude that certainly dates back to Sidney's
assertion that "the poet, he nothing affirms."

This split in Oppen's poetic identity is the legacy of the socialist realist aesthetic
that dominated the artistic policy of the Communist Party when Oppen was politically
active. Obviously, the young objectivist could have no truck with such an aesthetic:
"The situation of the Old Left was the theory of Socialist Realism, etc. It seemed
pointless to argue. We stayed carefully away from people who wrote for the New Masses."This explains Oppen's thirty year silence, extending from his initial political
involvement, through his military service in World War II, and into his self-imposed exile
in Mexico during the McCarthy years.

The long silence that Oppen felt it necessary to impose upon himself can be explained
in aesthetic, that is, poetic terms, as well as in the sociological terms that Oppen
himself offers. Indeed, such an explanation is a necessary adjunct to what has been
summarized above. Oppen argues that a desire for political efficacy must be satisfied by
political action rather than being channeled into an artistic response. Yet Oppen's
poetry, in that the impetus behind it is the same impetus that caused him to give up
poetry, is thoroughly political, and grapples with some of the most basic and significant
ethical issues that have informed political action in our time. How does the individual,
locked within his own consciousness, reconcile himself to the contradictions of
contemporary society's "numerosity"? Is such a loss of subjectivity possible, of
even desirable? Oppen struggles to find the ethical answers to these questions in the face
of overwhelming skepticism, a skepticism justified by his immediate perceptions of the
society in which he lives. For Oppen, as for Williams, the poem is a field of action, and
if the action with which Oppen is concerned is political in nature, then politics perforce
enters the poem. Along the same lines, Oppen condemns any notion of "the
poet-not-of-this-world" and declines exhorting the poet to face reality only with
great reluctance. Clearly, it is in the poems, so intimately bonded to Oppen's social
experience, that a resolution is sought to the dialectical tensions of skepticism and
commitment the poet has confronted all his life. The totality of the poems within the life
is Oppen's test of truth.

from "Political Commitment and Poetic Subjectification: George Oppen's Test of
Truth."